About Juvia

Juvia is an open source commenting system. It allows you to outsource your commenting needs to an external system so that you don't have to build your own commenting system for each website or each web app. Embedding a Juvia commenting page only involves pasting a JavaScript snippet into your web page.

Juvia is similar to Disqus and IntenseDebate. However both of them seem to be designed in the early 2000s before the rise of AJAX: trying to integrate either of them in an AJAX web application results in many wasted afternoons and a screen full of inexplicable JavaScript errors. Juvia offers full support for AJAX web pages and any JavaScript is written in such a way that it avoids conflicts with the page's existing JavaScripts.

Juvia currently also makes no effort to support nested comments. I believe nested comments only make sense for extremely active discussion forums. Instead, Juvia strives for simplicity.

Multi-user support. With this I don't mean commenters but users who operate the Juvia admin panel. Each user account is isolated and can only see and manage its own sites, topics and comments, except for administrators who can see and manage everything.

TODO

Juvia currently suits my need so I may or may not work on these things in the future. But if you want to contribute you are more than welcome to do so!

A better logo. I drew the current one in Inkscape in about an hour but I'm sure real artists can do better.

Juvia works fine but we need more tests to prevent things from breaking in the future.

Document the list_topics API call.

Set rel=nofollow on links inside comments.

A Quote/Reply button for each comment.

Import/export support. Not sure whether this is necessary, the user may as well backup the entire database.

Email notification for commenters.

Moderation teams. Currently each site is owned by exactly one user, and only that user or the administrator can moderate comments. And right now only the site's owner is notified by email of new comments.

Better interface for low-resolution screens like mobile phones.

Allow commenters to edit their comments. Of course, this requires some way to authenticate the commenter. Maybe Juvia can send an email with a time-limited authentication code (assuming the commenter specified his email in the first place).